Portable devices are increasingly more common and mobile, such as laptop computers, tablet personal computers (PCs), mobile PCs, as well as other mobile data, messaging, and/or communication devices. While portable devices have become more mobile and convenient, the size of device integrated displays has decreased to accommodate the mobility and convenience of the devices. Current visual browsers for videos, photos, and game content rely on the ability of a user to recognize particular media assets in order to select or make decisions based on those media assets. This limits the display size of the media assets because a user needs to see enough of an image to discern a media asset for selection. As the display screens become smaller, pictorial details can be lost.
Additionally, the current media interfaces that are utilized to discover, sort, locate, and sample media content are uniformly built on top-down information hierarchies that are known to break down for very large, disparate sets of media content. For example, the data set of Web pages has transitioned discovery from content category searching to generic Web searches that use heuristics to find arbitrary content or to refine subsets of discovered content and data. Typically, a Web search is initiated with text input which is not well-suited to initiate content discovery for non-text content and in keyboard-free contexts, such as in the navigation space for television and entertainment systems.